ASTANA (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia would use all its weapons against Ukraine if Kyiv were to acquire nuclear weapons.
The New York Times reported last week that some unidentified Western officials urged the President of the United States, Mr. Joe Biden, to give Ukraine nuclear weapons before he leaves office.
“If the country we are fighting against now becomes a nuclear power, what do we do? In this case, we will use everything, I want to emphasize this, in fact all the means of destruction available to Russia. Everything: we will do it. We will not allow it. We will be watching their every move”, said Putin at a press conference in Astana , Kazakhstan.
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“If it’s legal someone would transfer something, it means breaking all the non-disclosure agreements they did,” Putin said.
Putin also said that it was not possible for Ukraine to develop a nuclear weapon, but that it could develop some kind of “dirty bomb”, a conventional bomb loaded with radioactive material in order to spread contamination. In that case, Russia would respond appropriately, he said.
Russia has repeatedly said, without providing evidence, that Ukraine could use such a device.
Ukraine inherited nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union after its collapse in 1991, but gave them up under a 1994 agreement, the Budapest Memorandum, in return for security guarantees from Russia, the United States and Britain.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly complained that this move has left his country unprotected, citing this as an excuse to be admitted to NATO – something that Moscow strongly opposes.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Lucy Papachristou and Maxim Rodionov; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)